This book brings together a set of contributions that examine the complexities associated with domestic work by highlighting not only the legal issues but also exploring the social, psycho-social, economic, and cultural dimensions of domestic work. The book aims to ignite a collective effort towards ensuring decent work for domestic workers and facilitate a public debate on their rights. It includes discussions on the issue of social justice with special emphasis on invisibilization and undervaluation of domestic work, feminization of domestic work, and recognizes the rights of domestic workers as human rights. The issues covered in this book bridge the gap between legal and social dimensions of domestic work and address the discrimination faced by domestic workers in a holistic manner. Given its scope, the book would appeal to both academics (law as well as social science) and non-academics. It will be a useful tool for teachers, students, practitioners, policy-makers and civil society organizations working for the unorganized sector.

This publication sheds light on the magnitude of domestic work, a sector often "invisible" behind the doors of private households and unprotected by national legislation.The adoption of new international labour standards on domestic work (Convention No. 189 and its accompanying Recommendation No. 201) by the ILO at its 100th International Labour Conference in June 2011 represents a key milestone on the path to the realisation of decent work for domestic workers. This volume presents national statistics and new global and regional estimates on the number of domestic workers. It shows that domestic workers represent a significant share of the labour force worldwide and that domestic work is an important source of wage employment for women, especially in Latin America and Asia. It also examines the extent of inclusion or exclusion of domestic workers from key working conditions laws. In particular, it analyses how many domestic workers are covered by working time provisions, minimum wage legislation and maternity protection. The results demonstrate that under current national laws, substantial gaps in protection still remain. The volume concludes with a summary of the main findings and a reflection on the relevance of the newly adopted international standards to extend legal protection to domestic workers.

Proposed text for discussion at the 100th session of the Conference slated for June 2011. This is to carry out the decision, made during the 99th session in June 2010, to revisit the topic for a second discussion.

Domestic servitude blurs the divide between family and work, affection and duty, the home and the world. In Cultures of Servitude, Raka Ray and Seemin Qayum offer an ethnographic account of domestic life and servitude in contemporary Kolkata, India, with a concluding comparison with New York City. Focused on employers as well as servants, men as well as women, across multiple generations, they examine the practices and meaning of servitude around the home and in the public sphere. This book shifts the conversations surrounding domestic service away from an emphasis on the crisis of transnational care work to one about the constitution of class. It reveals how employers position themselves as middle and upper classes through evolving methods of servant and home management, even as servants grapple with the challenges of class and cultural distinction embedded in relations of domination and inequality.

The specificities of domestic work in relation to the workplace alongside the intersections of gender, class, and caste indicate a complex picture in India. Though domestic workers have become a significant workforce in all large cities and even in small towns, not much information on the specificity and complexity of the sector and its challenges is available. The papers in this volume address interesting dimensions of the domestic work section, including exclusion of domestic workers, the reluctance and discomfort in accepting domestic workers as "workers," alternative approaches to unionizing and the specific experiences in organizing taking up the challenge of negotiating personal relations, and the specificities of work. A critical analysis of state policies and regulation of domestic work alongside specific issues of legal intervention is also attempted in this collection--both specific to existing legislation as well as in the broad framework of labor as well as women's rights. This study emphasizes the need to locate undervaluation and poor status of domestic workers in the devaluation of house work within capitalist development, an issue that feminist scholarship has raised time and again.

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Drawing from the EU-funded DomEQUAL research project across 9 countries in Europe, South America and Asia, this comparative study explores the conditions of domestic workers around the world and the campaigns they are conducting to improve their labour rights. The book showcases how domestic workers’ movements put ‘intersectionality in action’ in representing the interest of various marginalized social groups from migrants and low-income groups to racialized and rural girls and women. Casting light on issues such as subjectification, and collective organizing on the part of a category of workers conventionally regarded as unorganizable, this ambitious volume will be invaluable for scholars, policy makers and activists alike.

In the past decade, hundreds of thousands of women from poorer countries have braved treacherous journeys to richer countries to work as poorly paid domestic workers. Scholars and activists denounce compromised forms of citizenship that expose these women to at times shocking exploitation and abuse.In From Servants to Workers, Shireen Ally asks whether the low wages and poor working conditions so characteristic of migrant domestic work can truly be resolved by means of the extension of citizenship rights. Following South Africa's "miraculous" transition to democracy, more than a million poor black women who had endured a despotic organization of paid domestic work under apartheid became the beneficiaries of one of the world's most impressive and extensive efforts to formalize and modernize paid domestic work through state regulation. Instead of undergoing a dramatic transformation, servitude relations stubbornly resisted change. Ally locates an explanation for this in the tension between the forms of power deployed by the state in its efforts to protect workers, on the one hand, and the forms of power workers recover through the intimate nature of their work, on the other.Listening attentively to workers' own narrations of their entry into democratic citizenship-rights, Ally explores the political implications of paid domestic work as an intimate form of labor. From Servants to Workers integrates sociological insights with the often-heartbreaking life histories of female domestic workers in South Africa and provides rich detail of the streets, homes, and churches of Johannesburg where these women work, live, and socialize.